Archives for Scrutiny committee

Who should represent the UK in the EU, MPs or the Government?The Hansard Society’s recent collection of essays included many good proposals on how to improve Westminster’s scrutiny of EU business. We have already commented on who did not have…

Who should represent the UK in the EU, MPs or the Government?The Hansard Society’s recent collection of essays included many good proposals on how to improve Westminster’s scrutiny of EU business. We have already commented on who did not have…

Yesterday 102 Conservative MPs wrote to the Telegraph backing our latest report on EU crime and policing, which argues that the UK should take advantage of a one-off opportunity in 2014 to opt out of around 130 laws covering this area.Under a transitio…

Do you remember all that talk about how national parliaments would be strenghtened under the Lisbon Treaty (something which the pro-Lisbon camp continuously banged on about, presenting it as a ‘fact’, when in reality it’s anything but)?We’ve looked at …

It seems that the lack of scrutiny for Parliament since the Lisbon Treaty came into effect is not restricted to the SWIFT agreement. Documents from the European Scrutiny Committee point that three additional measures have been limited to only four week…

The controversial EU-US anti-terrorism data-sharing deal, named the Swift agreement, came under further attack yesterday as an almighty row broke out in the Commons. Labour’s very own Michael Connarty accused the government of treating Parliament wit…

The true effect of Lisbon, the practice not the theory, is beginning to come to light and, as some of us warned, it is far from pretty.The House of Commons’ European Scrutiny Committee, the body charged with sifting through EU legislation and holding t…

A new report from the cross-party House of Lord’s EU Scrutiny Committee will make yet more uncomfortable reading for all those Yes campaigners who are still, against all the evidence, operating under the illusion (or lie more like) that the Lisbon Trea…